America’s Popular Eugenics Goes Global

The eugenics movement, dedicated to managing populations and breeding better people, was an international movement with numerous local manifestations. But ample scholarship points to America’s role as the largest laboratory for eugenic experimentation and an epicenter of eugenics evangelism before, and even after, the Second World War. In piecing together America’s “Eugenic Nation” past, historians have traced how US state actors and elite institutions fashioned the institutional, legal, and intellectual underpinnings of eugenic policies migrated overseas. Scholars of the eugenics movement have also illuminated the historical significance of what one important collection of essays, focused on the United States, has aptly termed “Popular Eugenics”—that is, the   expansive realm of popular culture through which ideas about biology and environment, race and fitness, and social engineering through “better breeding” were represented, vernacularized, and circulated at home.

This essay considers the histories of the US eugenics movement and America’s expansive culture industry in tandem in order to better understand how the nation’s globalized cultural circulations mediated its role as a “semiotic center” of popular eugenic discourse in the world. Through examining a range of “eugenic commodities”—especially mass-market magazines and films—it shows how the transnational dimensions of the American culture industry helped disseminate widely informational materials produced by the US eugenics movement. At the same time, however, this paper also argues that the transnational commodity flows through which eugenics tenets were popularized and globalized also destabilized their meanings, particularly in regard to race. The expanding yet porous borders of the US media empire, the intertextuality of modern popular culture, and the growing significance of immigrants and the multiethnic working-class as both audience to and active producers of US mass culture, ensured that even the most didactic Mendelian eugenic treatise could become unmoored, transformed, and reconstituted at points of production and reception.